Texas Moon

[Bill Boehme]

Closely resembles the French Moon posted recently. :mrgreen:

This is from May 29. Seeing was not particularly good, so I stacked nine of the best ones in Photoshop and used mean value processing which did a great job of getting rid of most of the noise.

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[Celestron]

Thats a real nice shot Bill ! Whats your equip. ??

[Bill Boehme]

Thats a real nice shot Bill ! Whats your equip. ??

Canon XTi, Canon EF 400 mm f/5.6L lens, and Canon EF 2X II Extender to give 800 mm FL @ f/11. I normally use ISO 100, but in this case, to keep a reasonable shutter speed, I used ISO 200 and 1/60 second shutter speed. My good tripod is out of commission currently, so I had to use a lightweight tripod -- as a result, many of the images were blurred because of vibration. Only about 10% of the images were good enough to use.

My real telescope is still a work in progress -- it is a basket case Criterion Dynamax 8 SC.

[Bernoulli]

Looks like things really are bigger in Texas.

[A.S.I.G.N. Observatory]

Looks great Bill. I can really appreciate the work in this.

It might be my monitor, but the central dark lava basins are taking on a bit of a plastic look...don't know quite how to describe it.....

I do like it though.

Baz.

[Bill Boehme]

Looks great Bill. I can really appreciate the work in this.

It might be my monitor, but the central dark lava basins are taking on a bit of a plastic look...don't know quite how to describe it.....

I do like it though.

Baz.

It might be the result of the mean filtering or maybe rotating and then resizing downwards. I do not believe that I used any other NR, but I will go back to the originals to see what they look like. I do recall that there was thin haze in the sky which was continuously changing so maybe that is what is going on.

EDIT: I also only selectively sharpened the craters and not the lava basins.

[Bill Boehme]

Here is a full scale crop of the unrotated image. It does not seem to be much different than the previous version -- just bigger (yes, the moon is bigger in Texas). The Photoshop processing was mean value stacking and then selective USM at 150/1.0/0.

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[A.S.I.G.N. Observatory]

Yep, it is my monitor. I have just looked on my work PC and it looks much better.

Baz.

[Bill Boehme]

I did learn the hard way a few months ago that only the sharpest images should be used in a Photoshop stack because otherwise stacking just any images without culling can ruin the whole thing. Undisciplined stacking might result in less noise, but it will also result in soft images.

[Chopper Al]

Great images Bill. Amazing how much better the moon looks when you start getting the shadows playing with the mountains and craters.

Al

[princer7]

Very nice! Which lens did you use?

[Bill Boehme]

Very nice! Which lens did you use?

Canon XTi, Canon EF 400 mm f/5.6L lens, and Canon EF 2X II Extender to give 800 mm FL @ f/11. I normally use ISO 100, but in this case, to keep a reasonable shutter speed, I used ISO 200 and 1/60 second shutter speed.

The 400 mm prime is a really fine lens and I am very pleased with its performance. I find that it works quite well with either of Canon's extenders (1.4X or 2X ... or even both together). I purchased it for birding, but have used it for a number of moon shots also. I suspect that you could use your 100-400mm f/5.L zoom along with a TC to get a very good image. The 70-200 mm f/2.8L that you have is also an outstanding lens -- one of Canon's best zoom lenses, but it seems to lose a noticeable amount of sharpness if used with a 2X TC. However, with a 1.4X TC, there is no noticeable loss of sharpness. I don't remember whether the EXIF data is retained when stacking images in Photoshop -- I need to check that out.